Dausuul said:
Actually, I'd say 3E spells are the natural consequence of trying to impose balance after the fact on the BECMI/AD&D spell list, rather than scrapping the whole durn thing and starting over with a better sense of what belongs where.
Right, that's what I was trying to get at. 3e was trying to preserve all the elements of D&D as-is while making sure that no one PC got to rule the roost, as mages often did in prior editions. 4e has thrown out those elements and re-integrated (some of) them into a wholly new system.
Dausuul said:
What I'd prefer would be to kick animate dead upstairs to the level 7-8 range (spell level, that is--character level 13 to 15), and make sure it could only raise fairly weak undead. That wouldn't unbalance dungeon crawling, since regular human-type skeletons die if a CR 15 monster so much as walks by on the other side of the street.
Disposable minions are worth much more than their combat value when dungeon crawling.
I don't see a 4e version being any different, in the end, than the 3e version. Perhaps it will express the limitations differently (skeletons fall apart after 8 hours, instead of the HD limit), but then it doesn't have the same design needs for the spell.
Animate dead is a world-builder spell, used to explain how necromancers create undead hordes (uncontrolled hordes in 3e's case
) - available to NPCs and PCs alike. 4e has no need for it, because it doesn't express how the world works in mechanical terms - undead hordes exist because the DM says so. I honestly doubt it will appear in the game in any form until they get to a necromancer class, and perhaps not even then.
The same goes for just about any other spell that had a wall of text in 3e. I don't think many, if any, of them will be present in the PHB in a recognizable form, based on the lvl 10-16 wizard spells.
Polymorph and related spells like
magic jar are probably gone for time being, because that's a huge can of worms. We know that summoning isn't going to be in the PHB, and that mind-control effects have been punted off to a future psi-supplment.
Dausuul said:
We don't yet know if 4E will have that same broadening of focus at later levels
My guess is no, at least not in the core books. Not only is it a different kind of game, with different concerns, than dungeon delving (and a kind that not everyone is interested in), but it's also more about role-playing and doesn't neccessarily need explicit rules support.
